ABSTRACT
Issued without wrappers, the weekly numbers of Household Words did not carry the array of advertisements that were included with its successor, All the Year Round, from the mid-1860s. The few that it printed referred to its own supplementary publications (such as the Household Narrative of Current Events or the Household Words Almanac), forthcoming serialized novels, the semi-annual indexed volumes of the journal, or Dickens’s public readings. These occupied a small space following the last item in the number. Nevertheless, the journal shows a recurring engagement with advertising-thematically, as a topical issue; and formally, as a kindred discursive practice sharing its narrative interest in the social life of goods. As Jennifer Wicke observes in her groundbreaking study of the relationship between the discourses of the nineteenth-century advertisement and the novel (from which I take my chapter title), ‘Dickens’ texts are both a reading of advertisement and a harbinger of it.’1 Dickens’s childhood employment labelling jars at Warren’s Blacking marked the moment when ‘product was beginning to be conjoined to text,’ she argues, and his own later foray into advertising as a composer of comic verses for the firm indicates the extent to which the ‘boundaries sharply delineating newspaper writer, advertising writer, and aspiring “author” were still shifting’ at this time.2 Wicke is concerned to uncover the shared history and mutual influence of advertising and the novel as both discourses emerged from the mass culture of industrial production, and others, like Gerard Curtis, Daniel Hack, and Emily Steinlight, have built upon her work.3 But it was of course the nineteenth-century periodical, rather than the novel, which most visibly embodied the commodity form. As Lucy Brown argues, newspapers and advertising ‘had grown up together during the eighteenth century-the names General Advertiser, Daily Advertiser, Hull Advertiser, proclaim the fact,’4 and while editorial policy gradually came to draw distinctions within newspaper content between news, comment or advertisement, the generic ambiguities of advertising remain evident in the mid-nineteenth-century periodical press. Household Words shares with nineteenth-century advertising its structure of evanescence, multiauthorship (subsumed in the branding of a corporate voice), design to create a
regular demand for the product from consumers, and employment of a wide range of genres. As a ‘cheap’ miscellany, designed to appeal to a broadly middle-class target audience and eschewing the high cultural ground of the quality monthlies or quarterlies, the journal’s efforts to establish a critical purchase upon advertising simultaneously betray its complicity with it.
